By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995.)
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“Homosexuality is one in 10. It’s one in 10 on the football team. It’s one in 10 on the baseball team. It’s one in 10 on the softball team. It’s one in 10 on the basketball team. Those are facts” — homosexual activist Pat Griffin.
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One of the most persuasive arguments that homosexual activists use to support their agenda is the assertion that ten percent of all people are “gay.” If homosexuals can convince people that they make up a much larger portion of the population than they actually represent, they are much more likely to garner support for their agenda.
Even many ostensibly objective media will parrot this number. The homosexual movement has even named some of its organizations “The Ten Percent Foundation,” “Project Ten,” and the “One in Ten Club.”
The relentless media-boosted hoopla by the special rights movement has accomplished its intended purpose. Two recent Gallup polls found that Americans believe that an incredible 25 percent of people are homosexuals. Only four percent believed that five percent or fewer are homosexuals. Not surprisingly, the least educated Americans — those who tend to take their lead from the media — made the highest estimates.
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force founder Bruce Voeller said: “After years of our educating those who inform the public and make its laws, the concept that 10 percent of the population is gay has become a generally accepted ‘fact.’ While some reminding always seems necessary, the 10 percent figure is regularly utilized by scholars, by the press, and in government statistics. As with so many pieces of knowledge and myth, repeated telling made it so.”
The Source. The original source of the “ten percent” statistic is Alfred Kinsey, perhaps the world’s best-known sex researcher. His most famous claim held that ten percent of the male population is “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.”
Kinsey also claimed that four percent of all males are exclusively homosexual throughout their entire lives, and alleged that an incredible 37 percent of men have had homosexual experiences during their lives. These results are not only the basis of the homosexual-rights “ten percent” myth, but also serve as a cornerstone of the sex education classes taught in the Western world today.
Bearing its founder’s name, the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction produces volumes of information that forms the basis for much of the world’s sex education industry. However, much of the information and research generated by the Kinsey Institute is of dubious quality at best, as it has at times refused to reveal its sources and study methods.
Some researchers have reported that Kinsey was so fanatical about secrecy that he told his staff photographer William Dellenback that he would destroy all his files and risk imprisonment rather than let authorities see them.
Kinsey’s research represents a classic example of looking for data to support a preordained set of desired conclusions. Gershon Legman, the original compiler for Kinsey’s pornography collection, revealed:
“Kinsey’s not-very-secret intention was to ‘respectabilize’ homosexuality and certain sexual perversions. . . . He did not hesitate to extrapolate his utterly inadequate and inconclusive samplings to the whole population of the United States, not to say the world. . . . This is pure propaganda, and is ridiculously far from the mathematical or statistical science pretended.”
After his desired conclusions were drawn, all Kinsey had to do was ensure that the study process supported them, regardless of what data were gathered and analyzed. The best way to do this, of course, was to hire biased researchers. Kinsey only accepted applicants to do his research if they agreed with him that homosexuality was healthy and normal.
Next, to achieve the desired results, Kinsey focused only on groups that had a very high percentage of homosexuals relative to the general population.
Kinsey’s Male Report was based upon the detailed analysis of the backgrounds and sexual practices of more than 5,000 men. At least one-fourth of Kinsey’s sample population were prison inmates and convicted sex offenders, which represent about one percent of the general population.
According to Male Report coauthor Wardell Pomeroy, “We went to the [prison] records and got lists of the inmates who were in for various kinds of sex offenses.” Forty-four percent of all of the prisoners in the Kinsey male sample had had homosexual experience in prison, according to John Gagnon, a Kinsey researcher.
Kinsey himself concluded that members of the prison population were more than four times more likely to be homosexuals than the general population. Since studies show that the actual percentage of homosexuals in the general population is from one to two percent, this factor alone was enough to guarantee that Kinsey would get the “ten percent” figure he desired.
According to page 216 of the Male Report, Kinsey’s second sample population consisted of “several hundred male prostitutes [who] contributed their histories.” Most male prostitutes are by definition homosexuals. So if 300 male prostitutes were interviewed for the Kinsey study, this factor alone would add about a (300/5,000) = 6 percent rate of homosexuality to the final conclusion.
Most of the remainder of Kinsey’s sample population consisted of volunteers, many of whom were clients from his private practice actively seeking advice on their sexual dysfunctions. As any researcher knows, the “volunteer bias” principle holds that volunteers for any type of study in any field will invariably skew the study results because they are always unrepresentative of the general population. A random sampling is invariably more accurate.
Even the use of three biased populations was not enough for Kinsey. He wanted to make absolutely certain that his study results were “satisfactory,” so he deliberately asked his volunteers biased questions. The Male Report admits that “we always assume that everyone has engaged in every type of [homosexual] activity. Consequently, we always begin by asking when they first engaged in such activity.”
Despite the shoddiness of the research that backed up Kinsey’s studies, it has had a profound impact upon our society, because sex revolutionaries seized upon his tattered results in the same way the population controllers pounced on Paul Ehrlich’s ridiculous book The Population Bomb.
Finally — The Truth. In 1990, researchers Dr. Judith Reisman and Edward W. Eichel wrote Kinsey, Sex, and Fraud, in which they characterize Kinsey’s most famous works, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female as “the most egregious example of scientific deception in this [20th] century.”
Reisman and Eichel concluded that the actual percentage of male homosexuals in the United States is one to two percent, a figure strongly confirmed by a dozen large studies which also show that only 3.1 percent of men and 3.3 percent of women have ever had a homosexual experience in their entire lives — even if it was only one such experience.
The percentage of lifelong or exclusive homosexuality would of course be much lower. A study completed by Alfred Spira of the Bicetre Hospital of Paris in June 1992 showed that only 1.1 percent of men and 0.3 percent of women had had a homosexual experience in the last 12 months. A 2003 survey by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that only 2.3 percent of men and 1.3 percent of women referred to themselves as homosexuals. And a large 2003 Statistics Canada survey of 135,000 people found that only 1.3 percent of men and 0.7 percent of women identified themselves as homosexual.
Finally, in 2014, the United States Census Bureau reported that the number of Americans who identify as homosexual in the American population is about 1.7 percent for men (one out of 60) and 1.1 percent for women (one out of 90).
A Big Vote
Even some leaders of the special rights movement are becoming weary of the charade. Gareth Kirkby, managing editor of the Vancouver-based homosexual newspaper Xtra West, asked in 1998:
“Why is it that some of us continue to bend and twist and otherwise play loose with often outdated so-called facts? Why, for example, do we continue to insist that 10 percent of the overall population is gay or lesbian?…Yes, claiming we’re 10 percent of the population makes us sound Impressive, a big vote for the wooing and an interest group that can’t be offended without serious consequences.”
There is a pressing need to jettison the lies that prop up the special rights movement, and the “ten percent” myth should be the first one that gets thrown into the dustbin.
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